


Owner of a Lonely Heart

by Cowboy_Sneep_Dip



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Adolescence is hard, Angst, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Moms kissing a lot, Sexually Charged Fight Scenes, Violence, made-up chon'sin politics, putting the timeline in a blender on high for five minutes, teenagers amirite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 22:35:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20454647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cowboy_Sneep_Dip/pseuds/Cowboy_Sneep_Dip
Summary: Severa is born on a Monday, when the infirmary is caked in snow and the trees in the courtyard are tangles of dead branches dipped in frost. Born to the cold and windy royal palace, the daughter of the Chon'sin queen and a Ylissean pegasus knight, dark-haired and angry, born for a destiny she had no hand in choosing for herself. As she grows, the world turns darker - the tides of war crash against Chon'sin shores, and she must pick up her mother's swords and fight back against the violence threatening to tear her world apart.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Phrenotobe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phrenotobe/gifts).

> Hey y'all! Back at it with the rarepairs again. Big extra double special thanks to best pal @phrenotobe who was a consultant and editor for Say'ri dfjhdfjhdf
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

Say’ri stares into the flickering darkness, watching shadows shift and warp across the stone floor. Her headband is askew, tilted downwards to cover one eye, tinged red and bloody. She breathes slowly.

There’s a commotion in the hall, something frantic, words shouted, a clashing of voices and clattering of armor. Her mouth tastes like ash.

Two guards bundle past her cell, staggering through the hallway, a corpses suspended between them, each of them supporting the body from underneath an armpit. 

She sits up. Not a corpse, though blood trails in a jagged streak behind the body’s dragging foot. One of the guards mutters something and fumbles with his belt, grasping for keys. The body between them shifts and groans, voice low and guttural.

“Shut up,” snaps the second guard, sliding the cell door open and sending the body staggering and sprawling to the floor. There’s a sickening thud as the prisoner hits the ground, full force, flesh and bone against stone, and Say’ri would wince if she had the strength. Prisoners come and go. 

There’s a clattering and a grinding of metal as the cell shuts, and Say’ri is alone again. 

She sits up straighter and stares at the opposing cell, watching the blood pooling around the body. She frowns. 

“F...fucker,” spits the corpse in the cell.

Say’ri bolts to her feet and practically launches herself against the bars, wrapping her tired, dirty fingers around the iron. 

The body across from her shifts, long black hair spooling in curls in the blood on the floor. 

“Severa?!” Say’ri cries out, panic bleeding into her voice.

Severa rolls over, turning to face Say’ri. 

“H-hey, muh...milady,” she coughs, and when she cracks a smile Say’ri can see blood in her teeth. 

“Severa, what are you-” Say’ri’s sluggish tongue hesitates to form the words. Her voice is hoarse, dry and unused. 

Across the hall, Severa pushes her arms into the ground and weakly tries to lift herself. Her bangs are matted and pressed to her forehead, sticky with red that trickles down her bruised cheek. She spits. “S-sorry.”

“Severa…” Say’ri rests her forehead against the cool metal of the bars, reaching her arm out between them. She knows it’s futile. There’s nothing to touch but empty air, cool dusty blackness and torchlight cast on the floor and her daughter, spitting scarlet from between her cracked lips.

Severa groans and presses her hand into her side. “Shit,” she says softly, under her breath. 

“Language,” Say’ri chides her softly, closing her eyes. She can feel a tear worming its way from her eye. 

“S-sorry,” Severa grimaces. “Gods, it hurts…” She swallows weakly. “Everything...tastes like muh-metal...”

“Are you okay?”

Severa shudders. “I...yeah, I think so.” She licks her lips. She shifts backwards and touches her fingers to her blood-sticky side. “I haven’t checked.” Her breathing is shaky.

“Severa, you need to look at your wound,” Say’ri says calmly, with measured cadence. “Do you need healing?” 

Severa closes her eyes. “I’m okay.”

“Severa.”

“Just a...ah...just a minute…” Severa slumps against the bars of her cell, nestled into the joint where the bars meet the wall. Her clothing was white, once upon a time - an ill-fitting falcon knight tunic under an engraved breastplate Say’ri recalls belonging to her mother. The white of her tunic is stained a dark, sickening red. Say’ri’s stomach churns. 

Severa’s shaking fingertips are warm and wet as her arm slumps to her side. Say’ri can see her wound, now - something dark and angry and red and pooling beneath her. She needs help.

Say’ri tries to fight the shaking in her voice. “Severa. You need to keep pressure on the wound.”

“Mm…” Severa mumbles, her head lolling. 

Say’ri clenches her teeth so hard she fears they might shatter. Her pulse roars in her ears. “Severa.”

“Y...yeah…”

Say’ri pounds a weak, clenched fist against the bars of her cell. “Guards!” She rattles the bars. “Guards!” 

Severa slumps forward and blood runs down her chin, trickling down the silver of her breastplate. The movement of her breathing in her hunched form slows. 

“With all speed and haste, come quick!” She thumps the bars. “Your prisoner is dying!” 

Anger pools in her empty stomach. She lashes a leg out and kicks the bars. She knows her cries barely extend past the hallway, so thick are the stone walls that surround them and the timber floors above them. “So help me, if she dies, I will reduce every brick in Valm to dust!” She slams her shoulders against the bars. She roars out in anger, in desperation, wrapping her fingers with nails cracked and dirty around the bars, pulling though she knows it’s pointless. Even at her prime she was not strong enough to bend these bars, and the weeks of thirst and hunger have made her brittle and tired. 

“Are you not listening?!” Say’ri cries. “She will die! Have you no living soul, you cravens, you dogs? Do you not know which end to bless with a healing stave? Help her!”

Blood runs shining in the torchlight, a river between the bars of Severa’s cell. 


	2. Chapter 2

Severa is born on a Monday, when the infirmary is caked in snow, and the trees in the courtyard are tangles of dead branches dipped in frost. She cries, loudly, continuously, until the healers bring her back into Cordelia’s room and let her rest in her mother’s arms. Small, and shriveled, and red-eyed, with little balled fists curled up against her mother’s white shirt ringed in sweat. Cordelia is sleeping when Severa is brought back to her, but she wakes with her daughter quiet in her arms. 

Say’ri stands in the doorway, arms crossed, a smile gracing her lips. The little princeling is a bundle of energy already. 

Say’ri had built a crib to keep in the royal bedroom, draped in the finest silks imported from across Valm. It had been a long project, worked on between her duties to the throne of Chon’sin. Every moment spent in meetings, training, or sitting cross-legged in the dirt, hand-shaping the ornate curves of wood. It had been a project Cordelia had encouraged - something to keep Say’ri busy during the pregnancy, when she was more apt to bother her wife. 

Say’ri in silk, with her arm hooked loosely around Cordelia, watches her child’s stubby, scrabbling fingers. 

“She’s beautiful,” Cordelia breathes, adjusting in bed, her arms cradling Severa. “Little baby Severa.”

Severa stares at her with big brown eyes, curious and deep, absorbing every detail - the red of her mother’s hair, Say’ri’s cold hands gently tangled around Cordelia’s arm, the soft covers of the bed. Outside, wind rattles against the window, cold snow piling up in the corners of the frame. The moon is high above them, casting beams of white into the royal bedroom, and Severa holds her mother’s finger, her hands barely big enough to achieve even that. Cordelia kisses her brow, and then kisses Say’ri. 

Say’ri tugs Cordelia tighter and kisses her in return. “I think she’s hungry,” she says softly, watching the infant’s fingers scrabble at her mother.

Say’ri loves her family dearly. She loves them with all her heart, even as she sits in her office, reading treaties, signing papers, attending ceremonies, wishing she were not here. She was not made to be a queen, she thinks. It should have fallen to her brother to rule, and she would sit by the bend in the river and hold her daughter in her arms and watch the cherry blossoms floating in the water, and she would not have to bother with paperwork.

Severa’s education begins when she turns three, taught by the finest scholars Chon’sin has to offer. It’s less school at that point, and more daycare - she’s less apt to focus on what she’s told than she is to wander, to stare into space, and to neglect anything save sticking her thumb in her mouth. 

She doesn’t take to language quickly, and Cordelia worries it’s her own fault for speaking to Say’ri in Ylissean. With her focus split between two languages at home, she’s slow to acquire vocabulary and even slower to use words. She speaks not just carefully but fearfully. Cordelia sits her on her lap and they go over vocabulary. Severa likes pointing at the birds in the garden and calling them such. 

Cordelia supplements Severa’s lessons by reading to her from books, old picture tomes from Say’ri’s personal family collection. Some are Chon’sin myths, some are histories, some are fables of princesses and talking frogs and seamstresses and goddesses. Severa’s attention often seems less fixed on the stories than on her mother - the way she speaks, the movement of her hair, her eyes lighting up as she laughs. She holds Cordelia’s hand as she toddles around the bedroom cautiously, and Cordelia laughs when she falls to the carpet. 

Her hair grows in black and curly, straightening as she ages - a soft blend of her mothers’ black and red, evening out to a shimmering, rusted onyx. It’s a beautiful color, the way it shines in the sunlight, less so the way it soaks with mud and dirt as Severa stumbles around the garden.

Severa doesn’t seem to like Say’ri. 

Cordelia waves it off, assuring Say’ri that’s it’s a factor of time - she spends all day with Severa, so it’s natural that she’s more comfortable around Cordelia than her other mother, but Say’ri is uncertain. She elects to spend more time with her family, volunteering to watch Severa as Cordelia gets back into training and riding. She’s charged with training up a new squadron of Chon’sin pegasus knights, a monumental task for a nation until now bereft of sky knights. 

Cordelia’s language is still uncertain, thus her preference for Ylissean at home, but the recruits take to her quickly, poking fun at their doting foreign commander. 

And Say’ri spends more time with their daughter, carrying her to her study, to play with wooden blocks on the floor as Say’ri pores over treatises on economic regulation. 

Say’ri doesn’t really know what to do with a child, least of all her own - she had been raised primarily by her brother, their parents absorbed in their duties even before their death. So she sits at her desk and works quietly and watches Severa fumble on the carpet, sticking her thumb in her mouth and watching Say’ri work with her big, brown, curious eyes. 

Say’ri pardons herself from her office to deliver a letter to a minister down the hall, and she returns to find Severa has ascended her desk, using her chair like a ladder to sit on her paperwork and take a mouthful of ink from her inkpot. Finding it not to her liking, Severa spit it out, dumping black all over herself and Say’ri’s desk, staining her paperwork and the wood, and Say’ri returns to find her covered in squid ink and wailing. She laughs so hard that her guards rush in, certain that she’s under attack as she gasps for breath. 

In the evenings, Cordelia and Say’ri take meals together, eating quietly, discussing the affairs of state, the progress of the trainees, and Severa sneaks handfuls of rice when her mothers aren’t paying attention. 

In the winters she curls up beneath the kotatsu, her little legs tired from running through the halls of the palace, her brain and tongue tired from classwork, and Cordelia lays down at her side and cuddles her to her chest. 

The trouble doesn’t begin until Severa starts school proper. Her fifth birthday precedes the first spring of her education, when she is taken from her daycare tutors and put in the palace school, alongside the children of other palace residents. Alongside the children of viscounts and dukes and - in Cordelia’s words, sycophants - Severa’s flagging progress is all the more self-evident. She doesn’t focus in class, she acts out, she throws crumpled paper at the other children. Cordelia is worried that their child is becoming a bully when Severa is reprimanded for shoving another girl into the mud. 

Severa doesn’t make friends, least of all among the other children. When she’s not at school, she’s glued to Cordelia’s side, her fingers twined in the hand of her mother, waiting as Cordelia patiently helps her with her homework. She helps her with her vocabulary, her mathematics, writing. She takes to Chon’sin writing more easily than she does to Ylissean. 

She sleeps with Cordelia, curled into her, desperately clinging to her mother, and on the other side of the bed, Say’ri lies awake at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering. She loves her daughter, she truly does - but the feeling seems ill reciprocated.

Severa wakes up one night in sobbing fits - one of the boys at school was calling her names, and when the girls overheard they joined in the taunting. Say’ri holds her close, smoothes back her long black hair, and kisses her forehead softly. 

Cordelia begins to find Severa in the garden - where before she was adventurous, tugging her mother through the brambles and bushes, digging at worms and watching fish in the pond, she becomes withdrawn, sitting with her arms around her legs, tucked into back corners and into shadowed hiding places. 

Say’ri brings her snacks to coax her from her hiding spot to sit and speak with her about her day.

“I huh-hate it,” Severa says quietly. She crunches a candied sweet potato stick and scowls. “I huh-hate all of them.”

“That’s an attitude ill-befitting a princess,” Say’ri drapes her arm over Severa’s shoulders. 

“I hate being a princess,” Severa says. 

Say’ri purses her lips and doesn’t respond. 

2

Severa is six when she is first handed a sword. It’s a flimsy little thing, dulled wood, and she seems no more excited about these lessons than she is about anything else. The one boon is that her instructor is the best of the best - the sword queen, watcher of the southern waters, handmaiden to the Voice and the sword-arm of Naga. 

Say’ri lifts Severa’s arm. “Like this. Hold it out like this.”

Severa nods. 

The exercises start easy enough - thrusts, lifts, swings, mostly to build strength before anything else. Say’ri is proud of her progress. She takes to the blade naturally, no doubt a gift passed on from both of her mothers. Cordelia, in her general’s armor, watches from the side of the training yard, box of bandages and antiseptic in one hand, jug of water in the other. 

Despite her clumsiness elsewhere, Severa takes to the blade quickly - she enjoys lashing out, the expulsion of energy contained in each swing and each stab. Say’ri toys with her, parrying each blow, allowing Severa to deflect Say’ri’s slow and telegraphed counterattacks, boosting her pride and her confidence in her abilities. 

Her riding lessons go in tandem - that is Cordelia’s purview, and she shares a saddle with Severa and takes her on rides around the castle grounds. Despite Severa’s excitement and insistence, she isn’t allowed to fly just yet - she’s too young, Cordelia insists, and it’s important that she practice riding on the ground before adding another dimension to it. Severa sits in the saddle, her wooden sword lifted high in the air, and Cordelia rears her pegasus back and they gallop together through the fields around the palace. 

In the autumn, as the leaves turn orange and the air turns crisp and cold, Severa dons a hand-me-down fur cloak from Say’ri and burrows in the fuzzy white warmth as she and Cordelia ride through the countryside. 

Say’ri comes with them sometimes, riding her own horse, a pale palfrey that would take the lead, trotting ahead as Cordelia’s white-winged pegasus fell into step. They three of them would ride out together into the mountains and sit by riverbeds and at the edge of hillsides, looking out over the land that Severa would one day rule. 

Severa sits on a blanket, in Say’ri’s oversized cloak, her hands wrapped around a metal cup of tea. Say’ri brewed it in a teapot over a small fire, and the three of them sit together, watching snow fall from the grey sky and settle like a dust of sugar on the browning leaves. 

Cordelia kisses Say’ri’s knuckle and passes her her own tea. “I was thinking we could let Severa take the reins for the ride home,” she says playfully.

Severa stares at her, wide-eyed. “What?”

“You’ve been doing a good job with your lessons, and you seem to have a firm grasp on basic riding skills,” Cordelia continues. She takes a sip of her tea. “I was thinking you could ride on your own.”

Severa’s eyes light up. “Of course!” She grins. “I’ll be the best rider you’ve ever seen, just you wait!” 

Say’ri smiles at Cordelia and pats Severa’s head. “Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.” She runs an idle hand through Severa’s hair, combing her riding gloves through the black locks. It’s long enough for Severa to tie into two short pigtails that drape on her shoulders. 

Cordelia helps Severa mount her pegasus alone. 

“Be careful, dear,” Cordelia says, confident but wary. “We’ll be right alongside you, and she listens to my commands, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Severa brushes her off. “I know how it works!”

It’s maybe Severa’s first taste of true independence - she’s riding high on the afternoon, with a belly full of snacks and a heart full of her mother’s confidence. She grips the reins tightly and brings the pegasus into a trot, and then a gallop. 

Behind her, she can hear Say’ri and Cordelia riding close. 

But she doesn’t need supervision. She doesn’t need permission. She tugs the reins back. “Hyah!” she cries. She had seen her mother do it plenty of times - and she twists the reins, digs her boots into the stirrups, and commands her mother’s Pegasus to take to the skies. The wind cuts through her hair, cold and snowy, and her heart lifts in equal measure to the dropping of her stomach. Wings beat the air, white and feathery and cold, and Severa is airborne - she beams, her pride bursting from her chest with such vigor that she can’t even hear the cries of protest behind her, her mother’s whistles and shouted commands to her wayward pegasus. 

The mount stifles it’s wingbeats and shifts into a glide, descending back towards the fields, and Severa scowls.  _ No!  _ She was in control! She could do it. She could do it.

She tugs the reins against Cordelia’s whistled commands and the pegasus ignores her. “Stupid horse!” she cries out, standing in the stirrups. “Stupid horse, why won’t you l-”

Hoofs hit dirt and she shudders, her feet twisting in her boots, a crackle of twisting sinew and bone as she’s thrown from the saddle and send into the air to be caught by a tangle of thornbushes. 

She’s still crying when Say’ri carries her into the infirmary. 

3

Severa scowls at her cast. The sprained ankle had healed after a few days of rest, and most of her cuts had healed, save some of the nasty ones on her face and neck, and the one deep one on her collar that had bled into the cloak she had borrowed from Say’ri. Cordelia assured her over and over again that she was lucky to have been as unscathed as she was - it could have been much, much worse. 

But to her, it was the end of the world - no more sword training, no more riding, and the other kids at school wouldn’t stop asking her what happened, or poking her elbow, or staring at her in class, or whispering behind her back. One of the other students was the daughter of the head cleric in the infirmary, and knowledge of her screw-up had already spread among the ranks of children. 

Severa scowls at the dirt and cradles her arm. 

“Something the matter?” Cordelia asks, sitting at her side. 

“I wanna train,” Severa grumbles.

Cordelia sighs. It had been an ongoing battle. “When your arm is healed, dear.”

Severa kicks her legs out in disdain. “I don’t WANNA wait, I wanna fight!” 

“You need to rest.”

“I can use my other hand.”

“You need to focus on one.”

“How come the queen gets to use both?”

Cordelia sighs. “She’s not ‘the queen’, she’s your mother. Don’t call her that.” She stands up and scoops Severa up into her arms. “And she’s got thirty years of practice on you.”

Severa pouts into Cordelia’s shoulder and sticks her thumb in her mouth. 

“Don’t suck your thumb,” Cordelia chides softly. She carries Severa back through the halls of the palace, sets her down to take her shoes off at the door, and holds her hand as they walk into their apartments. Half-finished writing assignments lay scattered on the table where Severa had left them, smudged ink smeared across little boxes, obscuring characters. Writing with her left hand was proving a struggle, but she was getting better. 

She was angry, and that anger melded into determination. She sits cross-legged on the floor, writing on the oak table, resting her casted arm in her lap. She’d learn to do it with both hands. She’d be better than everyone else, twice as better. 

She’s still working on her homework when Say’ri comes home, soaked from the day’s cold, icy rain, her hair in wet tangles. She seems upset about something, but Severa can’t tell - she sits and works until Say’ri kisses the top of her head and has her set the table for dinner. 

Most occasions, they were tended to by palace staff - but sometimes, they preferred the peace of quiet, intimate privacy. Candle-lit shadows cast on the paper walls, the three of them sitting around the table, eating together. Cordelia cooked, sometimes - traditional Ylissean meals that Say’ri was still getting used to eating and Severa devoured with a ravenous ferocity. She was someone let receptive to Say’ri’s cooking - Cordelia assured her that it was a result of her more ‘refined palate’. 

After a week, Say’ri relents - so tired is she of her daughter’s stormy, irritated expression, the bored way in which she roams the grounds of the palace, pestering guards and servants - she relents and offers to teach her to fight with her left hand. 

Severa is thrilled to be following in the footsteps of the queen. Even when the cast comes off and her arm is fully healed, she still trains both arms - double the workout, every session, working until she’s drenched in sweat and her palms are raw and red. 

When she’s twelve, Severa stands at the palace gates and watches Say’ri mount her horse. It’s not a palfrey, like she had ridden before, but a war horse - thick and tall and strong, adorned with armor plates draped over its barding. Say’ri’s ceremonial armor is replaced with something thick and shining and the swords at her waist fill Severa with a dread she can’t place. 

Something was happening, something her mothers whispered about, something that creased a permanent knot in Say’ri’s brow and something that made Cordelia nervous and forgetful. She was spending more time training pegasus knights - new squads of recruits, brought in from training camps in the surrounding villages. 

Severa slips her hand into Cordelia’s and puts her other thumb in her mouth.

“Don’t suck your thumb,” Cordelia chides her, gently, tugging her arm. 

Say’ri approaches with the sound of heavy boots and the rustle of armor plating. She’s holding a helmet under one arm. “I won’t be gone a month,” she assures them. “I’ll return, my love.” She kisses Cordelia, softly and deeply, and Cordelia lifts her arms to hook her hands around Say’ri’s head and tug her closer, as if she’s afraid that her lips slipping away would mean her death.

Severa kicks at a rock on the steps and watches it bounce towards the gathered soldiers. It’s a rainy day. It rains a lot in Chon’sin, and she watches droplets pool on the silver of Say’ri’s armor as she climbs into her horse’s stirrup. 

She folds her hand back into Cordelia’s and watches the queen depart with her regiment of guards, and rain falls slowly on the rooftops. Cordelia unfolds an umbrella over her head. 

Severa doesn’t eat that night - she picks at her food unconsciously, shuffling around her plate with no intentions of consumption.

Cordelia watches her sadly. 

“Would you prefer something else? The kitchens still have stock if you’d prefer soup.”

Severa shakes her head.

“Are you worried about her?”

“No,” Severa furrows her brow. “I don’t care about her.”

Cordelia sighs.

That night Severa cries, for the first time in a long while - she wakes up drenched in sweat, gasping for breath, sobbing into her pillow to muffle her gasps. Cordelia sits up with her, one arm loosely draped around her shoulders, stroking her hair and wiping her tears away. 

She’s sitting in the garden writing in a workbook with her left hand when she speaks up.

“Why does the queen hate me?”

Cordelia frowns. “What?”

“Why does she hate me?”

Cordelia is taken aback by the question - she had thought it the opposite, even. “She doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t.” 

“Why did she leave?” Severa licks her lips. 

“She had to. You know that.” Cordelia sits up straighter. “She has duties to attend to.”

“Is she going to fight?”

“I…” Cordelia purses her lips. She doesn’t know the answer to that question. “I pray she will not.”

“But you don’t know.”

“No, I don’t know.” 

Severa closes her workbook and gets to her feet. 

Cordelia finds her in the training yard that evening, drenched in sweat, her calloused palms raw and seeping blood into the cloth-wrapped hilts of her training swords.

“Leave me alone!” Severa shouts, shoving her off when she tries to help. “Just go away!” 

Severa is thirteen and burns with the anger of a girl lost and rejected and powerful enough to make others feel it. 

Say’ri returns after three months in the south, a red cut traced across her cheek, stitches in her shoulder. Severa has been punished in school three times for hurting other students - the final straw was breaking an older boy’s ankle. She’s assigned a tutor and educated alone, in an empty classroom after school hours. Pain for pain, and then regret. 

She’s angry, angrier than she’s ever been. She doesn’t speak to Say’ri when she returns, even when Cordelia wraps her arms around Say’ri and smothers her with grateful, glad kisses. Severa stands in the doorway and watches - watches her mother kiss the queen’s lips and her hands tangle in the queen’s hair, loving and kind and aching. She watches the queen kiss her in return.

Severa lays in bed and stares at the ceiling.

“Mother?”

“Mmn?” Say’ri responds, her voice hoarse and sleepy. 

Severa bites her lip. “I think I want my own room.”

Cordelia shifts between them, pushing herself up on one elbow. She tilts over Severa and brushes her black hair from her eyes. “Hm? Why all the sudden?” 

“I’m not a baby anymore.”

Cordelia nods slowly. 

4

Severa sits in on council meetings. She doesn’t pay attention - she’s cross-legged on her cushion, picking at her yukata, thinking about anything but this - thinking about the cute girl in the courtyard, the new sweets from the Plegian merchants, books she had been meaning to return to the library - anything but the graven-faced men and women speaking in hushed, harsh voices. It was easy to switch off her brain - she’d think in Ylissean, and her brain would do the compartmentalizing by itself. She fussed with her hairbands while her mothers talked of war. 

Valm was something, maybe, and Walhart was up to no good. She didn’t really care. She spent the afternoon with a cute girl in the market, kissing her in the shadows of a fishmonger’s stall. Severa is fifteen and could not care less about being the crown princess to the throne of Chon’sin. She spends her days idling in the countryside, sleeping by the river, reading books in the meadow, taking girls out to restaurants in town to lavish gifts and food on them. She doesn’t care about them - no more than they care about her, she figures, girls interested in her for her money or her station or any other nonsense. But she doesn’t care because they have gentle hands and soft hair and clever tongues, and on more than one occasion she awakens her mothers with yelling matches with palace guards, mad at her for sneaking yet another commoner into the palace apartments. 

It’s a game to her, nothing more. 

Cordelia makes her carry a sword on her hip when she walks into the palace town - it was a birthday gift from Say’ri, a thin steel blade with a lovingly gilded sheath - and Severa begrudgingly acquiesces. It doesn’t match her clothes, she pouts. There have been thieves about lately - thieves, brigands, rumors of monsters. Valm was no longer an ally, but a word spoken with hushed, nervous tones. The word ‘empire’ was bandied about with greater frequency than Severa could recall hearing before, and sometimes one of her mothers would depart for days at a time on some errand. 

And she would sit in her room and kiss girls and sew details into the pieces of her ever-growing collection of robes and gowns. 

It doesn’t occur to Severa that war might happen until it’s at her doorstep.

It’s a sunny day when she’s attacked. They aren’t brigands, she can tell already. The wind cuts through the grass and the leaves rustle in the trees, and with a scrape of steel Severa draws her blade and tenses her legs. 

There’s a flash of silver, a clash, and red against the yellow grass. Severa’s hands shake.

Her hair floats around her in the wind, tangled in black cords that blur her tear-stained eyes and her quivering lips. She can taste copper - she had bit her tongue when she lunged and now it burned in her mouth while she watched an assassin bleed out before her, staining the pages of her novel with red. 

She closes her eyes, wipes her blade on her gown, and diligently returns it to its sheath. Just as she was instructed. Just as she had practiced hundreds - no, thousands of times. The sword princess of Chon’sin had taken her first life, and Valm would be hesitant to make such a mistake again. The assassin has green eyes. That sticks with Severa, showing up in her dreams when she tosses and turns at night, waking in the darkness, gasping for breath. 

Cordelia forbids her from leaving the palace grounds again. 


	3. Chapter 3

5

Severa rides with her mother to a hilltop overlooking the city and they watch the town burn.

The armor is heavier than she had ever expected it to be. She had worn it during training, of course, but there was a gravity to it knowing that it could be the difference between life and a blade in her ribcage. The sword at her hip bounces against her lightly as her horse thunders beneath her, close behind her mother’s pegasus. 

They meet up with a group of soldiers, some of Cordelia’s recruits - fresh-faced men and women in shining silver breastplates astride beautiful white steeds. Severa would be jealous if she could stop her heart from beating so quick, or her lungs from refusing to breathe. She vomits off the side of her horse after the recruits depart for the city. 

They are three days’ ride from the capital when Severa sees a battle for the first time. She is sixteen years old, and her armor is so very heavy, and the cherry blossoms are in bloom in the city streets. She steadies herself by pressing a hand to her chest with a click of metal, gauntlet against breastplate. 

“Is the queen leading the soldiers?” she asks Cordelia.

Cordelia nods. She had given up on correcting Severa’s word choice. “Yes. My soldiers are to aid with the evacuation from the river southwards.” 

“And you?”

Cordelia tugs her reins. “I am to protect the princess.”

“I don’t need your protection.” 

Cordelia laughs hoarsely. “Of course not.” She brings her pegasus to a trot and stands alongside Severa and they watch the movement in the city far below. There’s an eruption of fire and a building collapses, but it feels like the movement of ants from their vantage point. “Severa.”

Severa grunts in acknowledgement.

“Severa, I need you to look at me.”

Severa tilts her eyes upwards. “What?”

“If Say’ri is hurt…” Cordelia pauses, and that silence makes Severa nervous. She licks her lips. “If Say’ri falls in battle....” She tightens her grip on the reins. “We are a small royal family, Severa. We must stay vigilant and we must protect each other.”

“I thought we were supposed to protect our people.”

Cordelia’s gaze turns towards the city. “Yes, and that is Say’ri’s aim. But I am your mother, first and foremost.”

She overhears Severa sobbing in the bathhouse that evening, and in the dead quiet of night, Severa slides open the door to her mothers’ room and crawls into bed between them, resting her head against Cordelia’s shoulder. She clings to her and shakes, all her tears spent, and Cordelia kisses her brow and soothes her. 

She still trains, but now she wears armor and she practices horseback combat. It’s something she puts off more and more now that there’s weight behind it, now that she knows her blade is poised to cut through flesh and snuff out lives. She still dreams about green eyes.

She’s in the chapel when a guard rushes in. 

She’s not praying - she never really did, not even when she was taken to the temple as a child for worship and for holidays. She doesn't care much for Naga, nor the rituals of her supplicants, but she likes the peace and quiet of the temple. She can listen to the chimes in the breeze and kneels in what looks like reverent silence. If she did pray she would ask for the queen’s safety. 

Instead, she’s staring at the carved wood and wondering about dinner plans when she’s told that the queen is in the infirmary.

Say’ri is unconscious, splattered with blood, and Severa’s heart pounds when she sees her. It reminds her of the man bleeding out in the grass, the man she had killed. Blood is thicker than she had expected, but it still runs hot and quick, trailing down creases in battle-dented silver armor. She pushes the clerics and guards aside and throws herself at the queen’s side, tongue failing her.

“M-m-mother,” she stammers, kneeling at Say’ri’s bedside. 

“Give her space,” says a cleric, gently taking Severa’s shoulder and tugging her back.

“No!” Severa shouts angrily. “That’s my mother!” She lashes out and knocks the cleric into a man holding a tray of medicine. 

Say’ri’s eyes are closed and her face is streaked in dried gore and dirt. She’s slumped motionless in the bed, and as attendants pull of pieces of armor and unbuckle leather straps, blood runs into the sheets and stains the cloth red beneath her. 

Severa’s heart pounds in her chest, so loud she can’t hear anything - she can’t hear the guards pulling her away, the clerics shouting commands to each other, everything is fuzzy and cotton in her ears and her eyes and when she looks at her hands, they’re red. Say’ri’s blood is warm.

One of the guards that pulled her off of Say’ri gently sets her on the floor and she scrambles backwards, pushing herself into the corner of the room, chest heaving and eyes red-rimmed. She hugs her legs to her chest and watches the clerics work. She can smell medicine - disinfectant and alcohol and the crisp herbal odor of vulneraries, and she can see soft light emanating from the clerics’ staves. She watches her mother’s motionless body, numb and shaking.

“Severa.”

Her hands are shaking and smell like copper.

“Severa.” 

A hand waves in front of her face. She tilts her head up like a motion through molasses. “M-m-m-m-” she stammers, unable to get the word out.

“It’s okay,” comes Cordelia’s soft voice. She kneels in front of Severa and wraps her arms around her. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

“I-I-Is shuh-she-” Severa gasps, “shuh-she guh-guh-guh-” she curses her stupid useless tongue. 

“Let’s give her some space,” Cordelia answers, pressing her lips to Severa’s brow. Her arms are strong and warm and comforting, and her height advantage gives her the proper leverage to lift Severa and pull her to her feet. She guides Severa out of the room slowly, confidently, trying to keep her from staring at Say’ri’s bloodied body and motionless eyes.

It wasn’t  _ supposed _ to be this way. 

The queen was invincible. She was iron in a world of paper. She was the watcher of the southern waters, handmaiden to the Voice, the sword-arm of Naga. She had repelled the penetration of Valm into Chon’sin, she had defended the temples in Roseanne. She had stood strong against the tide of steel and armor and lances and now she was bleeding - she was  _ dying _ in a stupid bed in a stupid infirmary! 

Severa pushes back against her mother, lashing angry arms at her and prying herself from her grasp. She can’t breathe, she can’t see, she can only smell copper and see blood in the grass. She collapses in the courtyard. 

6

Severa brings flowers to Say’ri’s bedside in the mornings, waiting for her to wake. The clerics are hopeful, and reiterate such every time she asks.

She hates it. She hates the hush over the palace, she hates the furtive glances passed between guards and lords as she moves past them, hates the whispered uncertainty. She knows the lords hate her - they have ever since she started snoring during the economic ministers’ lecture, she suspected - and if Say’ri dies... she tidies the flowers on Say’ri’s bedside and stares at the princess-consort, her mother. If something happens - if Severa can’t bear the weight yet - her mother will be queen. The thought is too much.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly, reaching a cautious hand out to touch Say’ri’s. Her fingers are cold and bandages are twined between her thumb, forefinger, and middle finger. Her head is swathed in bandages, too, some red from seeping blood, and the rest of her is covered in soft white sheets. 

Severa is too afraid to grasp her hand, so she leaves her to rest. 

“The healers say that she will live,” Cordelia says into her dinner.

Severa nods.

“I’ll be heading out to the front tomorrow morning.”

No reaction.

“Are you listening to me, Severa?”

She isn’t. She’s trying very hard not to cry into her bowl of noodles. She’s trying very, very hard, and failing so miserably that when Cordelia touches her shoulder she breaks, the dam collapsing, tears flooding out in scared, strained sobs. She’s a child, then, a child sobbing in her mother’s arms, scared about the future, scared about loss, scared about whatever will happen next. Chon’sin officers are being executed by Valmese soldiers and cities are burning and Severa can’t stop crying. 

“It’s okay,” Cordelia says softly. 

“Nuh-no it’s not,” Severa mutters into the crook of her neck. “Nothing is.”

Say’ri sits upon the throne after one fearful, dreadful month. An eyepatch fits over one eye, the other vacant and empty, her armor heavy on her bowing shoulders.

Severa doesn’t like talking to her. It takes several days for her to puzzle out why, exactly, and on the fourth day since Cordelia’s departure, she realizes she is afraid of the queen. 

“Mother,” she says quietly, bringing a bundle of paperwork before her. “Reports from Roseanne.”

“Thank you, Severa,” Say’ri says quietly.

“Mother?”

Say’ri looks at her pensively.

“I…” Severa purses her lips. “I wanted to ask if you’d heard news from...from Lady Cordelia.” 

“I have not.”

“Okay.” 

Severa stops practicing swordplay. It’s not fun anymore, and she can barely even hold a blade without her hands shaking. She hears stories of noble houses burning - dynasts have turned on the people, turning them over to the Valmese army, and in reaction, there have been peasant revolts - farmers with knives and pitchforks turning up at their lord’s mansions with blood in their nostrils and anger in their lungs.

Severa sleeps less, consumed with her thoughts and worries.Where would she go if the palace fell? If the people turned on Say’ri, if they abandoned their allegiances and their fealty and their faith? Where is there to go? Regna Ferox? Ylisse? Fleeing like refugees across the sea, leaving their possessions behind to burn in the flames of conquest?

She had never, not in her seventeen years, felt more relieved than when she sees her mother walk through the palace gates. She’s alive, and more than that - she’s whole, and she embraces Say’ri and kisses her, before doing the same to Severa. Severa holds her tight and squeezes her like she’ll never let go. 

With the princess-consort returned to the palace, Say’ri makes plans to return to the front. Their people need her. They need assurance that their queen lives, and fights on still, under the banner of Naga. The sword queen would again show her face in Valm, and the people would not be bowed by imperial might.

Classwork becomes more difficult. With Cordelia commanding the palace guard and Say’ri burdened with her duties and recovery from her injuries, Severa’s role as princess becomes more pronounced. She is no longer permitted to idle her days away in books and training, and spends her time outside of class assisting the queen with administrative duties. Her schoolwork flags - she spends less time on homework and more on organizing paperwork for the queen the review. 

She’s pulled out of classes regularly, brought to Say’ri to deliver letters or fill out reports or to take messages to the dynasts that remain. Say’ri struggles to walk, still, so she summons Severa away from her studies to aid her in her tasks.

Severa misses classes. She misses the simplicity of them, even when she hated them. Now she is pulled from lessons on history and politics and strategy and she is made to look at battle reports. It’s somehow less abstract when the paper smells like smoke and iron. She stops attending classes altogether.

She sits in on council meetings to act as Say’ri’s scribe, taking down notes and dictations when Say’ri is unable to attend herself. She’s recovering, but it never seems to be fast enough. Every day that passes Severa grows more bitter and more frightened. 

“Why does she hate me?” she asks Cordelia one night.

“She doesn’t hate you.” Cordelia frowns. “Of course she doesn’t. Why would you think that?”

“She never talks to me. She just…” Severa sighs. “Just makes me do stuff. Like paperwork and delivering messages, and all this stuff we have servants for.” Severa chews her bottom lip for a silent minute. “She’s treating me like I work for her.”

Cordelia brushes Severa’s hair with a stray hand. “In times like these, it’s important that everyone do their part. Even you. We all have sacrifices we must make.” 

  
  


7

Cordelia cries the night Say’ri departs, and Severa stands in the doorway, watching her sob into her pillow. She suspects Cordelia doesn’t even know she’s there, and she wants it to stay that way.

There’s something unseemly about seeing your mother cry, Severa thinks. It’s not right, it’s not how the world should be. Mothers comfort their children, not the other way around. Severa can’t even keep herself together - what use would her calloused hands be to a woman so wounded by despair that she cannot pull herself from bed in the morning? 

Severa asks what is happening at the front, to make Cordelia so desperate, but she is met with silence.

The countryside around the palace is quiet these days. Most of the townspeople have evacuated, headed east for the coast, away from the ever-encroaching war front. Severa still takes walks through town, her sword on her hip, but there’s less to see, less to do. There aren’t girls, not anymore. There aren’t markets or festivals, either. She sits at the edge of a dry fountain and watches a regiment of soldiers pass. 

She reads the reports from the front before passing them on to her mother. She doesn’t care anymore - no one seems to give a damn about protocol or tradition or chain of command, and she wants to know what’s happening. She breaks the wax seal on a letter and skims the lines of hastily-scrawled black text. 

The report comes on the first day of autumn.

The queen is missing.

Severa’s hands shake as she delivers the news to her mother. The queen had been leading her soldiers in battle near the wyvern valley. Among the misty hills are echoing canyons, the Chon’sin forces were obliterated. The status of the queen is unknown, feared dead, though scouts have not recovered a body. 

Cordelia, stone-faced and unblinking, takes the letter from Severa and forbids her from reading any more bulletins. 

“Why?”

“Because I’m your mother, and you’ll do as your told.”

Severa scowls. “That’s stupid! I’m just trying to keep informed, because someone needs to make decisions around here! Someone needs to lead, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be  _ you! _ ” she screams, and Cordelia bursts into sobs.

Severa slams the door behind her as she stumbles away. She’s not just sad, not just scared, she’s  _ angry _ . She’s angry at everything - at Cordelia, at Say’ri, at the entire empire of Valm, at the Chon’sin soldiers who failed to protect the queen, at herself for being too young and stupid and useless to do anything about it. 

She kneels by the river choked with fallen petals, and washes her face with cupped hands full of cold water. 

The queen can’t be dead, because that would mean that Severa is the new ruler of Chon’sin, and Severa mismatched her socks this morning. She dries her face with the hem of her robe and makes her way to the war council.

Cordelia isn’t in attendance, but Severa practically kicks the door open as she approaches. Her voice is loud, and clear, and commanding, and the stupid old men with their stupid debating would have to shut up and listen.

“Listen up!” she shouts, one hand on her hip. “With the queen missing and her consort ill, I’m in charge now. That means you listen to me.” 

There’s murmuring and furtive glances passed among the council elders. 

“I said shut UP!” Severa shouts, crashing a foot through the short table of one of the whispering men. He cowers backwards. 

Severa paces the room, her glare angry and her pose commanding. She stares at one of the men she remembers fighting with her mothers a lot - a minister of foreign affairs, the one that kept scoffing at Say’ri’s mentions of Ylisse and Ylisseans. 

“You. Get out.”

“Y-your majesty-”

“I said GET OUT!” Severa picks up the his papers and thrusts them into his arms. He hustles past her, unwilling to provoke more ire.

All eyes in the room are on Severa as she paces the circle of cross-legged scholars and politicians and dynasts. She folds her arms over her chest. 

“Listen up. I’ve had it with you stupid old men and your constant bickering. While you sit here and argue about stupid things, your people are dying!” she stamps her foot. “Soldiers are out there dying while you decide whether or not it’s worth it to send them food? Is that what the meeting was about today?” 

She stands still, daring anyone to speak. “My mother is missing, and that means I am in charge. You will all report directly to me. You will tell me as soon as you have news, and you will listen to my commands. Do you understand?” 

“Well, hold on-” stammers an older man with a greying beard. 

Severa plants a foot on his short table and glowers at him. 

“You can’t bully us into submission,” he says, furrowing his brow. “The point of this council is that we all decide the best course of action, not-”

There’s a scraping of steel as Severa draws her sword. She tucks the tip of the blade under his chin. “We’re well past that, sir.” She looks into his eyes, enjoying his fear. 

She steps back and sheathes her sword. “Our lands are burning, our people are starving, and you sit here and grow old and fat deciding what to do. I don’t care if I’m seventeen, I don’t care if I’m half-Ylissean, I am the regent and you will listen to what I say.”

“What would you have us do, then?” a woman speaks up, a woman with a wrinkled face and dark hair. 

8

Severa slumps over Say’ri’s desk, resting her face in her palms. She had thrown the clock out days ago, sick of the tick-tick-tick-tick, the constant reminder of the passage of time. Moonlight streams through the window. She doesn’t know what time it is but she’s changed the lamp oil three times.

She sighs and leans back in her chair. Not her chair, she reminds herself - Say’ri’s chair. The queen’s throne, the seat of power in Chon’sin. From this desk, she rules all. She opens a drawer and picks up a sheet of blank paper. 

Her ink pot is empty again.

She scoots her chair back with a scraping of wood and begins to dig through the desk drawers. For someone who exudes an air of such fastidiousness, Say’ri sure left her desk in a state of disarray. Severa finds old dusty books, calendars from long-past years, carefully filed away papers and documents and cards. There’s a bundle of letters written in scratchy unorganized Ylissean - from the prince, she gleans from a cursory glance.

She almost bursts out laughing as she pulls a piece of paper out - it was a letter she had written Say’ri when she was still learning to write. It was horribly messy, almost illegible, a happy birthday wish and a little drawing of three figures. 

Severa holds it in her hands, half-smiling at it. She sets it on the desk next to the papers she had been working on. 

She had never sat at Say’ri’s desk in all her seventeen years. Her office always felt forbidden, somehow. Something dark and mysterious and weighty, like venturing into the mouth of a horrible beast with teeth of books and carved oak. How strange it is to see that it is not so different from Severa’s own room - there’s a calendar with marked dates, little notes with scrawled reminders, pictures of Severa and Cordelia drawn carefully from memory. 

Severa bites back a sob as she pulls out a letter. It’s a request to Severa’s teacher to provide her extra time on exams while her broken arm heals. Severa clenches her teeth and blinks. 

She had been so ungrateful - cruel, even - to a woman so bound by duty that she could not spend time with those that she loved so dearly. Severa folds her arms on the desk and buries her face in them, muffling a shuddering sob.

Severa cries into her arms, wishing things were different. Wishing she had been a better daughter, wishing her mother was not the queen, wishing life was still simple. Now the queen was dead - there’s no getting around that - dead and in the ground. In a wyvern’s belly, Severa thinks, knowing that corpses don’t last long there. She cries until she’s nauseous and throws up in Say’ri’s wastebasket.

Leaving the desk askew, she gets to her feet and stumbles blindly for the door. The tears won’t stop coming. She bows her head and walks quickly, almost a panicked, sobbing run, staggered footsteps down the hall towards her mother’s room. She throws herself into bed with Cordelia and weeps openly.

She is not fit to be a queen. She is not fit to fill shoes never meant to be emptied. She is not fit to sit at such a large and vacant desk, still smelling of ink and shadows and smoke and steel, sitting where her mother’s ghost resides. Severa cries into Cordelia’s arms until the morning sun creeps through the window, laying a filter of gold over her ruddy, tear-stained cheeks.

Cordelia and Severa sit together and eat breakfast. Severa goes to the kitchen to make it herself and returns with fish and rice and egg and they sit and eat in silence. Cordelia watches her curiously. 

“I’m okay,” Severa says quietly. Information volunteered without prompting, as if saying it made it true.

“Okay.” 

Severa doesn’t get up to return to the queen’s office. She finishes eating, gets to her feet, kisses the top of Cordelia’s head, and lays back down in her mother’s bed to rest. She’s done being a queen. Not much point in it, she figures. 

It’s hard not to feel like Chon’sin is falling apart after weeks poring over reports. They were losing on all fronts - outnumbered, out-equipped, low on money, low on food. Farmers with pitchforks against the walls of iron and the warmachines of the Valmese empire. Most of the main army had been dashed to pieces. Several reports came with missives begging the queen and her mother to flee across the sea, to seek refuge in Ferox or Ylisse. 

Severa sleeps like a cat in a beam of sunlight, curled up on the floor, her head in Cordelia’s lap.

She’s asleep when the report comes in.


	4. Chapter 4

9

Severa sits on a pegasus overlooking Fort Steiger. She scans the walls of the fortress, taking in information. Her big, brown, curious eyes, soaking in the movement of guards, the movement of archers behind arrowslits, cavalry patrolling in the fields. 

Fort Steiger is impenetrable. It is an impregnable wall, the forward operating base of the Valmese invasion. She reaches up and rubs the back of her scalp. It had been a four day flight from the capital - sleeping in nooks in the rocks, subsisting on the dried rations she packed in her saddlebags. Cordelia must have known she had left on the second or third day. Maybe she still didn’t know, if Severa was lucky. 

She dismounts and sits on the hilltop to take her meal. Hard bread and dried, salty meat, washed down with riverwater she had boiled over a campfire. She sits cross-legged in the grass and waits for sundown.

Plans were always a bit above her pay grade - she was strong, and she was confident, and that was enough. An all-out assault on Fort Steiger was out of the question. The old dynasts were probably still debating whether or not it is worth saving the queen or if it’s time to dissolve the line of succession once and for all. But Severa doesn’t care. 

She travels light, wearing leathers and carrying two swords on her hip. She borrows Cordelia’s engraved breastplate - she wouldn’t be seeing combat anymore anyways, and takes a pegasus off into the night. And now she watches the movements of guards and she chews a piece of jerky and she thinks. 

There’s no way to know the layout of the fort, but she read books - they kept prisoners in dungeons, right? Usually in the bottom, or maybe a tower. She could stop and ask directions at knife-point. 

It’s colder up north, away from the coast, and she shivers in the twilight breeze. It’d be warmer in the fort, so there’s an incentive to make it there. She pats her pegasus’ flank and whispers reassurances that she’ll be back, and she climbs down the hill, slipping between rocks and into ravines, her boots digging into dirt. The sun sinks low behind the hills and the sky glows with starlight above, and a shadow slips between the patrols. 

The Valmese soldiers are a rough sort, harsh and loud and inattentive to the slim girl darting between barricades. Two men in armor pass a flask between them over a fire. Severa plunges her sword into the first man’s back and vaults over his shoulders, drawing her second blade and flicking it across the man’s neck. Blood sprays in sheets down his armor and he collapses into a heap. 

She wipes her blades off in the grass and searches the men for anything of use. 

The liquor burns as she finishes the flask. Liquid courage, she had heard it called in books. She had never drank anything before except wine at fancy dinners and stolen sips of her mothers’ sake, but the Valmese liquor is hard and hot and bitter. She fights back the urge to retch into the fire and drops the flask in her wake.

The fort approach is easier than she had expected - other than the two guards, it’s mostly empty this time of night. Guards still patrol the walls, but she is a ghost, a shadow. Two silver blades in the night.

She had practice doing this sort of thing - for years, she had been sneaking out of her own palace, knowing the volume of her footsteps, visibility in low light, the likelihood of blind spots in patrol patterns. It would be futile to approach the main gate - it probably only opened for departing or arriving armies, and slipping through there would be impossible. But there would be smaller places - side doors, wrought-iron gates, drainage ditches. 

A gatehouse, maybe, manned by a single tired soldier. She hits him on the back of his head with the hilt of her sword and slumps his body against the wall. 

It’s difficult to pull the clothes off an unconscious body but she manages to strip him down to his undershirt and pants and pull his doublet over her shoulders, stretching it over her breastplate. She bundles her tails of long black hair into coils and tucks them into a helmet. Moving is stiff and uncomfortable and she can barely see out of the ill-fitting helmet, but it’ll do for now. She pulls a cloak from the hook by the gatehouse door and drapes it over her shoulders to hide the form of her swords.

She moves about the fortress walls like a shambling corpse, a stitched-together soldier of Valmese leather and Chon’sin leather, a hulking mass that grunts and offers casual salutes to the other soldiers before hurrying on her way. She slips through the outer wall and into the courtyard, where she pulls the helmet and borrowed clothes off and stashes them in a bush. She had considered taking one of the Dark Flier uniforms, and to be dressed in black now would be a boon, but she already made her choices.

Inside the walls, she moves quickly, stealthily. 

She presses her back to the stone wall and listens at corners, walking in the shadowed edges of hallways and muffling her boots on carpet. A pair of patrolling guards appear at the end of a hallway and she ducks into an alcove, smothering out the torch with her gloved hand. 

The guards pass not five feet from her hiding place, close enough for her to smell the sweat and smoke and the odor of ale on them. One of them belches and laughs and Severa scowls from the shadows. 

Chon’sin guards would never be so unprofessional, so unkempt. She waits for them to round a corner before continuing her trek. 

She descends, down spiral staircases and through sloping stone hallways, into the dark and musty bowels of the fortress. 

It doesn’t take long for her to be spotted. 

The lower levels are spartan and bare, carpets and decorative nooks passed over for solid stone walls and slick, echoing floors. There’s nowhere to hide in the maze of halls, past solid oak doors with heavy metal locks, past guard rooms and common rooms and men still training, even late into the night.

There’s a cry in the dark behind her and she knows she’s been spotted. She sheds her cloak and takes off into a dead sprint, bolting down the hallway to the roar of commotion behind her. She rounds a corner and finds herself at a dead end.

She isn’t the sword princess for nothing.

She dispatches two of the guards swiftly, turning her shining silver blades on them, moving like the wind, deflecting blows and slicing her blade into the hinges of their armor. With two hands she thrusts the point of her sword through one of the guards’ chests. He collapses in a spray of scarlet that splatters Severa’s silver breastplate. 

She’s breathing heavily when she steps over the bodies, sweating and tired. She wipes her mouth and tries to stifle her breathing. Three down. A whole fortress to go.

The fort is on high alert, now, and she can hear the shuffle of footsteps and marching boots above her. An intruder in the fort.

She rounds a corner and draws her blade again, unsheathing and slashing it up a man’s chest in a single stroke. He cries out and collapses - not a guard in armor, but castle staff in a silk jerkin. He collapses in a heap, gurgling and sputtering, and Severa clenches her teeth. 

“You!” a gruff voice calls out, and she whirls around, just in time for a slim iron sword to crash into her breastplate. She staggers backwards and lifts her sword to parry, knocking the blade aside and drawing her second sword to plunge under the man’s arm. He cries out and falls, ripping the sword from her hand and splattering her with blood.

She spits red from her mouth, her lungs burning, her chest like it had been hit with a hammer. She isn’t sure whose blood is in her mouth, but she’s beyond caring. She vaults over a railing and leaps down the stairs, too late realizing she has miscalculated the distance.

She hits the solid stone with bent knees and tries to turn it into a roll, but she smacks her head against the stone and her vision is filled with sparks. She coughs and this time there’s no mistaking whose blood pools on her lips. She staggers to her feet and readies her remaining sword with one shaking hand. The other she presses to her forehead, rubbing her temples to try and ward away the dancing lights in her eyes.

There’s a sharp pain in her calf and she collapses again. 

She can hear a triumphant cry behind her and scrambles to get her bearings. Her leg feels hot and sticky. 

She weakly staggers to her feet, swinging her sword wildly at approaching guards, batting them away without finesse or aim as she slumps against the wall and limps along it. Someone grabs her hair and yanks her backwards. 

She doesn’t hit the ground - instead a blade pierces her side, plunging through her back and protruding from the side of her stomach. She screams and drops her sword. Another blow, a heavy blunt blow to her head, sends her careening into the wall, and she collapses to the ground.

Her stomach feels warm. She reaches a shaking, uncertain hand towards herself. It’s warm. Everything’s warm and numb. There are voices around her, angry and frantic and victorious, and she touches her side with fascination, like she isn’t sure where all the red is coming from.

  
  


10

Say’ri presses a gentle hand to Severa’s forehead, dabbing the blood from her brow. She’s still bleeding - the vulneraries had to go to her mortal wounds, leaving Say’ri to fix up the rest. She leans back against the wall of her cell and adjusts Severa’s head in her lap.

She’s awake, Say’ri thinks - she mumbled through the visiting healer and muttered some indignant obscenities at the pain, but her eyes remain closed and her breathing remains slow and uneven. 

Say’ri had seen corpses who looked better. 

She wouldn’t be able to walk for some time, and Say’ri hesitated to let herself think that she would again - an arrow had plunged into her calf, tearing muscle and sinew, leaving her leggings and her boot torn and crimson-brown. 

Say’ri purses her lips and wipes a dirty cloth across Severa’s lips, brushing the blood away. She works diligently, cleaning her forehead, her bruised cheek, her lips. The healer had helped wash and wrap Severa’s leg and her side, but they had been forbidden to use magic beyond vulneraries. They are still prisoners, after all.

Say’ri wipes the sweat from her brow and slumps back against the wall of her cell. She keeps pressure on Severa’s forehead, but most of what could be done was complete. She closes her eye and practices slow breathing.

There’s no way to measure the passage of time in Fort Steiger - the walls are dark, featureless, lit by torches at all time of day. Say’ri isn’t sure how long she’s been here. She kept track of the early days by counting her sleeping and waking cycles, but it seemed futile. Pheros would not let her come to harm, nor would she let her escape. She was here, in this stone purgatory, whiling away the hours with meditation, reflection, and rest. 

Perhaps it was the closest thing to a vacation she had had in years, she thinks with some bemusement, stroking Severa’s bangs from her eyes. The food was not ideal, and the bed could be more comfortable, but she had faith in her wife and her daughter.

She did until her daughter was dragged through the door, bloody and cursing. 

“What brought you here?” Say’ri asks softly. Severa’s eyelashes are long and dark when her eyes are closed. 

Say’ri hums softly in the darkness. It’s a lullaby she had learned from Cordelia, all those years ago some melody from Ylisse. She would sing it to Severa when sleep eluded her. 

Severa stirs in her lap, her lips quivering in intimations of mumbled speech. She parts her lips, slightly, just enough to breathe heavily. 

“Mom…” she says quietly, without opening her eyes.

Say’ri doesn’t stop, light fingers against Severa’s head, soft melody in the air. 

“Mom...it...it hurts…” Severa’s voice is hoarse. 

“Hush, little dove,” Say’ri shushes her, cradling her skull in her palms. “You are safe with me.”

Severa whimpers and curls against Say’ri. 

The last meal that the guards had brought sits untouched in the corner - a dented pitcher of lukewarm water and a slice of hard, black bread. Say’ri presses the pitcher to Severa’s lips. “Drink.”

Severa sputters and spits, water, dribbling down her chin and soaking into her shirt. 

Say’ri takes the back of Severa’s head and tilts her back, helping her drink before breaking off small pieces of bread for Severa to wash down with water without needing to chew.

There’s a tap against the bars and Say’ri looks up.

“I heard the Chon’sin princess had appeared. I thought I’d check on our new visitor myself.”

“Pheros,” Say’ri breathes. “I bid you as an old friend, help me. My daughter needs medicine.”

Say’ri strokes Severa’s cheek as she hiccups, and regards Pheros with a weary, intense stare.

“We have nothing to spare.” Pheros wraps a gloved hand around the bar. “I’m sorry. I can have more water sent down, but rations are stretched thin as it is.”

Say’ri swallows and nods. 

Pheros stares at the bloody girl crumpled on the floor in Say’ri’s arms. “She’s very beautiful.”

“Aye, thank you,” Say’ri says quietly.

“Walhart’s men are coming to inspect the fortress.”

Say’ri’s eye turns hard and cold, even though she cradles her daughter still.

“I will keep Excellus out of the dungeons.” 

Say’ri watches her leave, listening as the sound of her footsteps vanish down the end of the hall. And then all is silent again.

Severa blinks up at her. “M-mother…?”

“Shh,” Say’ri brushes her thumb against her cheek. “Just rest.”

More meals are brought - it’s the only marker of time Say’ri has anymore. She forgoes most of her own food in favor of feeding Severa, giving her water and pieces of bread until she’s strong enough to sit up and chew on her own. Sometimes it’s not just bread - there are watery, salty stews with unidentifiable chunks of meat, smoked, chewy fish, and ale on occasion. Pheros brings a meal personally, now and then - usually to offer some small comfort or pitying sympathy. 

“Here,” she says, sliding a vial through the bars behind a tray of food. “For the pain.”

Say’ri looks at her questioningly. 

“Just a mouthful should be enough to dull her pain.” 

“Thank you.”

Pheros lingers, hovering just outside Say’ri’s visibility, still in the shadows. She looks tired. She takes a deep breath, like she’s about to speak again, before vanishing.

Say’ri wakes up to find Severa crying. 

“I’m s-suh-sorry,” she whispers curling against Say’ri on their shared cot, wrapping her shaking, weak arms around Say’ri. “I...I need you. Muh-mother needs you…”

Say’ri quiets her and sits up with her, waiting for her bout of pained sobbing to end. 

“Does Cordelia know that you’re here?”

Severa sits up and wipes her nose, still sniffling. “No.”

Say’ri nods, disappointed but understanding. 

“We...we need you,” Severa says, curling her hands into fists around her knees. “Everything’s falling apart...mother wouldn’t even leave her room, the council was talking about disbanding...we...we need you. We all do. I...I need my mother back.” Severa looks up with tears in her eyes. “I...I thought I could do it.”

“Shh…” Say’ri whispers. “I know. I am so proud of you.”

Severa sniffles. “You are?”

Say’ri smiles playfully. “Perhaps getting caught was not the best plan, but you worked hard to keep the kingdom together.” She rests a hand on the top of Severa’s head. “And now I know that you are safe.” She kisses Severa’s forehead. “That is one less concern weighing upon my heart.” 

“Who is that woman?” Severa asks. “The one who keeps talking.” She blinks. “I wasn’t dreaming that, right?”

Say’ri sighs. “General Pheros, the woman in charge of this fort. Once upon a time I called her my friend.”

Severa scoffs. “I didn’t think you  _ had _ friends.”

“It was a long time ago.” She sits up. “She is the reason I am alive. Lady Pheros and I decided that the best course of action would be for me to stay here. She had no desire to execute me, nor did she desire to turn me over to the Emperor.”

“Oh. Huh.”

“And so I waste away here, away from the war, from my family and my people…”

“The dynasts think you’re dead,” Severa says flatly. “Or they want you to be.”

“Ah,” Say’ri laughs and the sound is hollow. “They never did care for me. Once I was a thorn in their side, and I think I am that thorn still.”

Time passes - day to night, half-light of torches to half-light of torches. Severa stands weakly, still too hurt to walk, and elects to sit in the corner rather than share space on the cot. 

“Mother,” she says, as Say’ri is on the cusp of sleep.

“Mm?”

“I’m…” Severa purses her lips and stares at the stone floor. “I’m sorry. For...for how I treated you. You didn’t deserve that.” She chews the inside of her cheek. “I...I wish I could have been the daughter you wanted.”

The silence between her words and Say’ri’s response feels like a lifetime, a deep sigh and then Severa regrets that she had said anything at all. This isn’t the place for a talk like this - nowhere is, maybe. Maybe she would live her life and Say’ri would grow old and die and Severa would never admit how she feels like a disappointment every day.

“I’m sorry,” Severa says again, blinking. “I...I thought you hated me. I thought you were disappointed in me.” She squeezes her eyes shut and opens them. “I know most of the other nobles did. I was just some stupid half-Ylissean brat who couldn’t read and couldn’t speak good, and all I did was ruin things.” She folds her arms around her knees, grimacing at the pain of it. “I...hated you too. I thought...if you were going to hate me and be disappointed in me, then there was no reason for me to be different.”

“I was never disappointed in you,” Say’ri says. 

Severa sniffles and lifts her head. “What?”

“I saw how hard you worked. How much harder you worked than anyone else at everything you did - your training, your studies. I wanted to give you the space you needed to grow.”

“I didn’t WANT space!” Severa exhales. “I wanted a mother! And I felt like...you treated me like I was a servant. Like you could just give me stuff to do and you let m-mother do all the...the mothering.” Her words are stupid. She trails off and bows her head between her knees, her face burning red in the dark. 

There’s a touch against her shoulder. 

“Don’t touch me!” Severa lashes out, immediately regretting it as pain slices through her abdomen, leaving her whimpering and shuddering on the floor. 

Say’ri obeys her wishes, folding her hands to wait. Severa cries to herself, shaking against the bars of their cell. 


	5. Chapter 5

11

They don’t talk much after that. There’s little to say, even less that wants to be said. Severa alternates between sleeping and staring into the darkness, lost in thought. Say’ri doesn’t speak, unwilling to push her when she does not want to be bothered. 

Say’ri is worried Severa is getting worse. Without proper care, her wounds aren’t healing - she still bleeds from her side if she moves too much and she cannot walk without painful limping. Say’ri asks for medicine at every meal - failing that, she administers the painkiller Pheros had given her, allowing Severa to languish in a hazy high.

Pheros hovers outside their cell, on the edge of darkness.

“Please,” Say’ri says quietly. “Let us use the infirmary, at least. She can’t heal like this.”

Severa leans against the bars, her legs splayed across the floor. She blinks slowly and looks up at Pheros as she approaches the cell and leans against the bars. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Please, Lady Pheros-”

“Don’t call me that,” Pheros curls her hand into a fist and rests it against the cross-bar. “Don’t call me that.” 

“And why should I not?” Say’ri sits up, suddenly angry. “Are you not that same Lady Pheros from all those years ago? How far you have fallen from your calling if you will let a child rot and die in prison for a man you barely know?”

Pheros slams her fist against the bar. Severa’s head bounces against the metal.

“Do not speak of the Emperor so!” 

“The Emperor,” Say’ri says with disdain. “Dare you not speak his name? He is Walhart, and from his lips come demands to let children die. And yet you fight for him.”

Pheros’ hand shakes. “He will liberate us.”

“He will subjugate you!” Say’ri pushes herself to her feet. “He’s fooling you, just as he fooled the nobles in Roseanne and my own dynasts! He is a conqueror, a bloodthirsty demon bent on plunging Valm into the fires of hell!” 

“Then perhaps we deserve to burn!” Pheros casts her eyes down, sharp and angry as Say’ri approaches. “Perhaps it is better than nobles squabbling while villagers starve. Better than the religious zealots crawling across Ferox and Ylisse like weevils! The Emperor can feed his men, at least. That’s more than you can say.”

Say’ri almost thrusts her hand through the bars and throttles her. “Lady Pheros,” she says gravely, trying to hide how anger makes her shake. “You are not the woman I once knew.” She swallows, her eye drilling into Pheros’. “The woman I knew was brave, kind, and just, and here you stand before me as a cowardly husk of the same!” 

“Then she shall let you rot, if she is no longer brave.” Pheros slams a hand against the cell bars and turns, leaving in a huff, heavy bootsteps against stone. 

Say’ri exhales with frustration and slumps back down to sit on her cot. “I apologize,” she says quietly to Severa’s motionless form. “She and I have...history.”

“I’m sorry,” Severa says, opening her eyes slowly.

“Sorry?” Say’ri frowns. “For what?”

“You always told me stealing was wrong.” Severa sits up and lifts her hand. Slung around one finger is a ring of keys, which she twirls. She cracks a smile.

“I might find exceptions yet.” Say’ri smiles in return.

The first order of business is finding weapons, a task made monumentally more difficult with Severa limping slowly, supported by the wall on one side and her mother’s arm on the other. She can’t walk quickly, and each step comes with a sharp pain that drives air from her lungs and a grunt from her mouth. 

Say’ri slings an arm around her back and hooks it under her armpit, supporting almost all of her body weight. 

“Rest here,” she says, depositing Severa at the foot of a staircase. “I will scout ahead.”

Severa nods. 

As she watches Say’ri ascend the staircase until she disappears from view, she reflects that she has never seen her mother in a combat situation. In the training yard hundreds of times, against both herself, Cordelia, and other soldiers. But seeing her was like seeing a new beast entirely - her shoulders square, her legs tensed and quick, her movements like that of a dancer, elegant, shadowy, precise.

She vanish and Severa rests back against the steps. She fumbles in her clothes for the vial of painkiller, lamenting the single mouthful of murky liquid. She takes a sip and leans back, waiting for the numbness to crawl through her veins. She’s half-dozing when Say’ri returns, two swords bundled under one arm and a torch in the other. 

“Can you carry something?” 

Severa nods and grasps the hilt of a sword. As Say’ri helps her limp up the stairs, she tries to keep the tip of the blade from scraping against the steps.

“Do we...agh...do we have a plan?” Severa mutters as they come out onto a landing.

“Yes. You shall rest while I clear the path.”

Severa doesn’t have a chance to protest before she’s deposited again, made to wait with a sword on her lap as Say’ri does the real fighting - she can hear a clash of blades and a cry of pain, and her mother comes back to her, silvered blade dripping red in the torchlight. “Come.”

They move through the fortress slowly, Severa resting at odd intervals while Say’ri clears the path ahead. She has never seen her mother in action before, but the reputation of the sword queen did not betray the reality. Say’ri moves like water, her steps measured and careful, each swing of her sword leveled with pinpoint accuracy. She slices through joins in armor, she plunges the blade into seams in leather, she leaves a trail of broken bodies and pooling blood in her wake. The sword queen of Chon’sin lives again, a phantom striking from the shadows. 

Severa can see daylight through the hall as Say’ri half-lifts, half-drags her across carpet. The main hall is large, with marble columns and elegant rugs adorning the slick gold stone, red banners waving in the breeze. Severa almost cries when the cool, fresh air grazes her cheek. 

It’s not until she opens her eyes against that she sees the main entrance for its reality. 

Pheros stands before it, cast as a shadow, silhouetted by sunlight, a regiment of armored soldiers defending her. 

Say’ri grits her teeth and deposits Severa behind a column. “If you have the strength, flee.”

“Mother…” Severa catches Say’ri’s arm as she pulls away. “Be...be careful.”

Say’ri nods and emerges from behind the pillar, drawing her blade. “Lady Pheros!” she calls out. 

Pheros turns, startled, and her guards follow suit. 

“Or should I say, General Pheros?” Say’ri steps carefully to the center of the hall and lifts her blade to point it in the direction of Pheros. “For you have forsaken your nobility and pledged yourself to a despicable man. If you do not step aside, I will have your head.”

“I see that your time in the dungeon hasn’t changed you,” Pheros says, lifting her golden staff. The gold trim of her armor gleams in the morning light, only to be shadowed as she steps closer. Her clothes look like blood. Without hesitation, she fires a bolt of flame that erupts in the spot where Say’ri had been standing moments before. She scans the rows of columns. “Fan out! Don’t let them escape!” 

Say’ri, breathing heavily, leans back against the pillar, clutching her sword to her chest. She wishes she had her own blades - Chon’sin silver was a step above Valmese iron, and the difference was already wearing on her. It took more strength to swing, more effort to change the path of the blade as she thrusts. She steps out from behind a pillar and plunges it into the back of a cloth-armored mage. He crumples in a pool of red and Say’ri plants a boot on his shoulder to draw her blade from his spine. 

She moves between the pillars quickly, her footsteps silent. With her left hand she grasps the back of an armored knight’s breastplate and pulls it, yanking him backwards and exposing his neck. She wipes his blood from her face and kneels over his body, waiting. 

She’s contemplating plans of attack when an axe comes crashing down, aiming for her head. She lifts her arm and redirects the blade with her sword, shattering the blade into pieces in the process. She dives to the ground, avoiding another blow before scrambling behind a pillar.

“Mom!” Severa cries out, calling Say’ri’s attention. She tosses her blade towards Say’ri, who catches it by the hilt and spins, plunging it into the soldier’s abdomen. 

As he collapses, Say’ri looks back to Severa, who flashes a thumbs-up before grimacing and clutching her stomach. 

She draws her sword across another mage’s back and rounds a corner directly into Pheros’ waiting arms. 

She grasps Say’ri by the neck.

“You-”

Say’ri lashes out a knee that collides with Pheros’ stomach. She grunts and drops Say’ri, who scrambles backwards and lifts her sword. 

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Say’ri grits through her teeth. 

“That makes only one of us.” Pheros lifts an open book in her hand and sends a bolt of fire at Say’ri that bursts off her shoulder. Say’ri grimaces and paws at her burning garment, smacking at the fire while fleeing from Pheros’ follow-up.

She dives behind a pillar and rips her cloak from her shoulders, leaving her muscular arms bare,and uses her free hand to wipe blood from her face. 

“Where are you?!” roars Pheros, stalking around a corner. 

Say’ri lunges at her, thrusting her sword not at the woman herself but at the tome in her hands. The blade tears through leather and paper, scattering them to the air like a shower of leaves. Say’ri follows up with an uppercut, slicing towards Pheros’ arm. She steps back and draws her own weapon - a jagged spear with a thunderbolt tip. She thrusts it and as the blade graze’s Say’ri’s bare arm, she can feel a sizzling of lightning that makes her hair stand on edge.

She pulls back a second too late and Pheros’ lance scrapes across her flesh, drawing a sheet of blood down her bicep and numbing the muscles. Say’ri staggers backwards and lifts her sword to block the next strike. Her blade bounces off the shockstick with a flash of sparks, jolting her bones and numbing her arms. She swings with all her might, sending the lance clattering backwards, beating Pheros into a retreat.

Across the room, to a chorus of clashing metal and lit with flashes of sparking light, Severa crawls towards the exit. 

“You coward!” Say’ri roars, and Severa winces, curling up - she had told her to run, hadn’t she? “How dare you fight for that monster?” Severa breathes a sigh of relief, and rests, facedown on the floor. 

“You call me a coward?” Pheros snarls, smashing her lance into Say’ri’s sword. “You’re the one who left!” 

“Because my family needed me,” Say’ri grunts, locking her sword against the shaft of the shockstick. She pushes with all her might. “Because my brother needed me.”

“What about me?!” Pheros growls. “I needed you!” She lifts her arms and pushes Say’ri off, knocking her back.

Say’ri lets her sword-arm droop down, the tip of her blade resting on the floor. With her free hand she wipes her face, clearing her eyes of the sweat and the blood accumulating beneath her headband. “For that, I am truly sorry. I will always regret what I did.” 

Pheros’ lip trembles. She darts forward, boots digging into the carpet, and thrusts her lance. It pierces the air beside Say’ri’s stomach. “I’m trying to save you!” Her voice cracks, hoarse, anger bleeding into a plea. 

“I need to save my wife,” Say’ri says, lifting her sword. “And my daughter. My family needs me again, and not even the Emperor himself could stop me.” 

“He will,” Pheros lowers her lance. “He will not stop until every home in Chon’sin has been razed to ashes, if that’s what it takes. His plan will save us!”

“If he thinks Chon’sin will fall so easily, he is mistaken.” Say’ri lunges forward, a quick two-step-and-swing, catching Pheros’ lance and knocking her back. She follows up, raking the sword across her stomach. Dark red bleeds brown into her red tunic. Pheros presses a hand to her stomach and grimaces.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Pheros’ hand shakes. “Don’t you know what is going on out there? While you sit here, safe and defended, the world grows dark in ways you cannot imagine. The Grimleal are feasting on the corpse of Plegia like flies. Ylisse will fall, Ferox will fall. Valm will survive, whatever it takes.” 

“All the more reason for me to be with my family,” Say’ri grits her teeth and lunges. She knocks Pheros’ sword aside, “All the more reason to join my might to their defense.” 

“Monsters roam free...the reign of the dynasts is ending…” Pheros spits blood. “Noble houses butchered in their homes by starving peasants, villages burned in recompense. Valm is falling to chaos, and the Emperor…” she licks her lips. “I can protect you, Say’ri. I can protect her too.” 

“I will not rot in prison while my people die.” Say’ri plants a boot into Pheros’ knee and drops her to the ground. Pheros hits the stone floor and grunts, pushing herself weakly to her knees.

Say’ri slips the tip of her sword-blade under Pheros’ chin and raises it. 

Pheros grits her teeth and blood leaks from between her lips. She gives a wry, strained smile as her head shakes. “Don’t you understand?” She laughs, and when she does, her chin brushes the tip of Say’ri’s sword. Warm red drips down her neck, just a few droplets. “The palace is gone.”

“What?”

“The dynasts...hah...ah…” Pheros spits. “The dynasts have sided with the Emperor. You have no home.” She grits her teeth. “You have nothing.”

“No,” Say’ri shakes her head, her hand suddenly trembling, her sword shaking beneath Pheros’ chin. “You lie.”

“I do no such thing. On my oath as a priestess of Valm.” Pheros presses a hand to her bleeding stomach. “On my own life, I swear it. The palace was burned to cinders two weeks ago.”

Say’ri’s voice catches in her throat. “And what of Cordelia?” she whispers, her throat dry, “What of my wife?” 

Pheros purses her lips and offers a weak shrug. “Beheaded by some farmers, perhaps. Thrown in a cell to rot. All I know is that there is no throne, there is no queen.” Pheros leans back, away from Say’ri’s blade. “Walhart thinks you dead.” 

“You protected me.”

“I did.” 

Say’ri tosses her sword to the carpet. “Then he will not punish you for my escape. Do not try to stop us.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Say’ri kneels before Pheros, and takes her head in her hands. Pheros doesn’t fight it. 

“Pheros...my dear friend.” She swallows. “Once, we were alike enough to know each others’ thoughts.” She presses a quiet kiss to Pheros’ sweaty, blooded brow.

Across the main hall, Severa rests against a pillar, watching her mother curiously. There was something here she could not touch - something warm and familiar and ancient, a history locked into the recesses of a time before princesshood and war. She smiles weakly. Perhaps not even her own mother was above sneaking out of the palace.

Say’ri leaves Pheros against a pillar, a ball of bloody fabric pressed to her wound. She picks up Pheros’s hand, and presses it there. “Call your guards.” 

Pheros nods weakly.

Say’ri stops on her way out the main hall to sling an arm underneath Severa’s shoulders, to pull her to her feet with a grunt. 

“Hey... Mother…?” Severa says hoarsely as Say’ri drags her down the fortress steps.

“Yes?” 

“That was amazing.”

Say’ri cracks a smile as morning sunlight beats down on them. 


	6. Chapter 6

Cordelia was not in the palace when it burned. She had fled on a pegasus, clad in silks in the dead of knight, flying northeast, for the coast. She cut her hair and bought a black cloak, men’s trousers and shirt, and a heavy pair of workboots from a passing merchant, and she bought four sheets of paper, envelopes, wax, and ink. She sent one messenger to leave a letter in the smoking ruins of the palace. A hint, a clue.  _ Beloved - find me at the sea where our life began. _

She sits in an inn in Valm Harbor and writes three more letters, furiously penned and sent out on the fastest merchant ships she can find. She spares no expense - the royal treasury is no more, and her currency is rapidly worth nothing as Chon’sin sinks into chaos, so there is little harm in spending every last cent on a room at the inn and quick postage.

The first letter is to Regna Ferox - a plea to Khan Flavia for aid. The second is a letter to Chrom, who sits the throne in Ylisse - a former friend, a letter more personal than that which was sent to Khan Flavia. Cordelia inquires of the king’s princeling child, and she begs for his adherence to a promise they had made as children. She does not ask for soldiers, for Ylisse is embroiled in their own war, against the threat that pushes in from their eastern borders. She asks for whatever can be spared, and she asks that, should she die, her body be buried in Chon’sin. 

The third letter she keeps - she writes it to her daughter, a lengthy missive, one part apology, two parts love letter. She does not know to whom this letter could be sent. Her daughter, vanished for months, her wife, gone even longer. She folds it up and keeps it in her breast pocket. Every morning she stops at the docks and at the stables, sticking her head into smoky inns and dusty offices - she asks after the queen, asking if there are rumors. There are some, here and there - death is the common one, that the queen perished not long before the palace was burned. 

There are rumors of the Maiden of Swords being seen again, in central Valm - flashing silver, a trail of dead imperial soldiers. A shadow, a ghost, a rallying cry to the remnants of Chon’sin that still resist Walhart’s grasp. The one-eyed watcher of the southern waters. 

There are a curious set of corollary rumors, intermingling with the first - that there is a new hunter in the fields of Valm, a spirit with long black hair that moves like wind, twin blades cutting a path through the war front, smashing it to bits like a force of nature. A pegasus knight, a hunter, a nobleman, one of the Twelve Heroes reborn - all sorts of nonsense, dredged in whisky and dropped in the river to float upstream, warped and changed until there is certainty that Chon’sin will rise again - the sword queen is dead. Long live the sword princess. 

Cordelia doesn’t put too much stock in such rumors. It’s too easy to get caught up in fantasy, in hope and belief in a world that has dashed those very same against the shore, time and time again. She sits in the sand and watches the sun over the sea, painting the canvas of blue in a brilliant yellow.

And at night, she lays awake in her room, hoping, praying that tomorrow will bring a brighter day.

After one-hundred and sixteen tomorrows, she finds herself sitting outside the inn on a bench, watching passerby, when she spies a curious sight. A girl with long twintails of black, arguing with a merchant stall.

“No, listen!” the girl protests as Cordelia comes closer. “I don’t want both of them, I just want...well, no I don’t have the money for both! Just...ugh!”

“Money problems?” Cordelia smiles, sidling up to the stall.

“This stupid jerk won’t sell me-” Severa turns. “M...me...m...muh…” her chest catches. “Mother?”

“I missed you.”

Severa launches into her arms, wrapping herself tight around her, trying and failing to stifle her sobs. “Oh, gods, mother, I missed you...I muh-missed you so much…” Severa cries into her shoulder. “W-we both did.” 

“Say’ri…?” Cordelia hesitates.

Severa nods and squeezes her eyes shut before opening them again, with shining tears dripping down her cheeks. “Y-yeah, we got a room at the inn by the stables. So we can keep Aurora stabled, I mean.” 

Cordelia laughs. “Aurora?” 

“Y-yeah,” Severa brushes her eyes. “S-sorry for taking her without permission.” 

Cordelia kisses her daughter on the forehead. 

“The dynasts were not happy with you,” Cordelia explains as they walk through the harbor streets. After you threatened that minister, they vowed to dissolve the monarchy. Of course, the only one left at that point was me.” She bows her head. “They were executing palace staff who refused to surrender. When I fled, they were even burning the stables.”

“Eradication,” says Say’ri gravely as they approach. “General Pheros said as much.”

“Say’ri,” Cordelia breathes. She slips her hand from Severa’s grasp and throws her arms around Say’ri, peppering her with kisses on her forehead, her nose, her cheeks, and then a deep, passionate kiss to her mouth. Say’ri reciprocates, kissing back, harder. 

“I missed you, my love,” Say’ri breathes. “My dove.”

“And I you, my sharp-eyed hawk,” Cordelia grins, pressing her forehead to Say’ri’s. She kisses her again.

“Ugh, can you two not?” 

They take a meal together in the inn, the first real meal that Severa and Say’ri have had in a long while. With the war on, rations are slim, but they splurge on a thick, hearty stew and three flagons of ale. Severa crawls into bed with her mothers, exhausted, and sleeps so deeply she might be dead, were it not for the thin smile on her lips and the slow rise and fall of her ribcage. 

The peace does not last.

Valm Harbor holds out longer than most, but soldiers begin to appear in the city in larger numbers than before, roughing up citizens, checking documentation, searching caravans and ship holds. It is a bureaucratic sort of takeover, where the daily lives of citizens integrate into the new procedures with relative ease - there is no blood in the streets, no burning of fisheries or stockhouses or guard barracks. Prominent townsfolk disappear, here and there, and Say’ri, Cordelia, and Severa stay confined in their rooms. When they go out, it is with swords concealed under cloaks and faces shadowed by scarves. 

The harbor sees less use as time wears on - there are no merchants across the seas, and the banner flying above most ships is that of Valm - coastal shipments from other cities, other regions. There is no news from the south.

Cordelia is walking down the wharf when she spies a ship on the horizon, flying under no banners. She frowns at it. 

“Pack your things,” she says sternly, throwing a pair of boots into Severa’s lap as she walks through the door.

“What?” Severa blinks and sits up. “What’s happening?” 

“I don’t know, but we can’t stay here.”

“Love?” Say’ri frowns at her.

“Ships on the horizon. I don’t know if they’re from Ferox or Plegia, but…” Cordelia frowns. “If the situation across the sea is anything like ours, I don’t want to stick around for whomever comes out of that ship.”

Say’ri nods and bundles up, tucking her swords under her cloak, helping Severa do the same. Cordelia dons her breastplate and pegasus knight linens under a dark cloak that obscures her shape before tucking a thin iron sword into her belt. 

They pay their fare at the inn and hustle out the door, into the empty streets. Not many hang around Valm Harbor anymore, and those that do stay indoors. 

“Eyes down,” Cordelia says as they pass a pair of red-armored soldiers. 

Severa obeys.

“You there,” the one of the guards grunts. He stops before them and plants the butt of his lance in the dirt.

The harbor smells of salt and fish and Severa stares at the wet cobblestones beneath her feet. She dares to look up, not at the guards but at the horizon - the blue sea, the ships with tall masts and white sails. She holds her breath.

“Mother,” she says quietly as Cordelia speaks to the guards in a frantic, pleading tone.

“Be quiet, Severa,” Say’ri hushes her.

“Mother…those ships are from Ylisse.”

Say’ri looks up.

“Cordelia.” Her voice is flat, measured.

“I’m sorry,” Cordelia smiles sweetly at the guard. “My wife,” she shrugs. “What?” she hisses as she turns. 

Say’ri and Severa move together as one, drawing their swords with swift motions and tearing through gaps in the soldier’s armor. Cordelia cries out in surprise and clutches her head, tensing as a blade passes her on either side. 

“Sorry, mom,” Severa says, drawing her blade from inside the guard and wiping blood from her cheek. “If we gave you a head’s up, they might have known we were up to something.”

“What the gods-”

“It’s Ylisse,” Say’ri says, standing up. 

Severa can barely contain her excitement as she bolts down the wharf and onto the sand. She sheathes her sword and waves. 

“She doesn’t know anyone from Ylisse, does she?” Cordelia tilts her head.

“Nay, dove, but I’m sure she’s excited to meet new friends.”

“Weeks cooped up in an inn will do that to you.”

The first of the ships lands at the shore, and they can see the man standing above the gangplank. He lifts a hand in greeting and runs it through his tousled blue hair.

“That handsome idiot,” Cordelia smiles. “What took you so long?” she calls out as she approaches. 

The crown of Ylisse sets his first step on Valmese sand. “You know. Paperwork.” 

“Chom,” Say’ri nods curtly, extending her hand. 

He shakes it, grinning. “Missed you, princess.” 

“Queen, actually,” Severa says, sticking her head in. “Hey not to ruin this reunion, but I think some soldiers are coming.”

“I thought they might,” says Chrom, resting his hand on the hilt of his sword. 

A girl is next down the gangplank, with tangled blue hair that matches Chrom’s own. Severa stares at her as she climbs down the gangplank and takes a jump. She lands in the sand with a flutter of her cape.

“H...hey, who is that?” she tugs on Cordelia’s sleeve. 

She leans in to whisper in Severa’s ear. “That’s the Exalt’s heir, Lucina.”

“Oh. They’re really pretty.” 

Cordelia stifles a laugh. 

“Hi,” Lucina says, accompanied by a goofy grin. “Uh. I guess we can do introductions later.” She draws her sword. 

“I’m Severa,” Severa says, drawing her own and turning to face the harbor streets.

The morning sun beats down on the sand, and shimmers on the waves like gold streaming through glass. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!!
> 
> Obligatory Social Media Plugs:  
https://twitter.com/Cowboy_Sneep  
lucisevofficial.tumblr.com


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